A FREE AND ORDERED SPACEThe Real World...

A FREE AND ORDERED SPACE

The Real World of the University

by A. Bartlett Giamatti ( W. W. Norton: $19.95) Yale’s former president, and the National League’s current one, contributes a fresh voice to the debate over higher education in America, writing not about what we ought to know, but about why it is important to know. Some readers will be critical of the way Bartlett Giamatti, like a good coach, inspires through reaffirmation rather than redefinition; he writes often of the need to find new academic directions lest the university “become frozen in internal mythology, in a complacent self-perpetuation,” but he doesn’t tackle specific curricular questions, such as how to focus students’ thoughts without coloring their vision with a distorting ideological lens.

Giamatti’s vagueness is purposeful, though, for he stresses that the university’s greatest strength is its pluralism, its lack of a narrow academic mission other than the search for truth. “The university serves the country best,” Giamatti writes, “when it is a caldron of competing ideas, and not a neatly arranged platter of received opinions.” Giamatti believes in a kind of intellectual independence, where each individual “imposes (a) design on the seemingly endless continuums of physical or human nature.” This is the activity we engage in “every moment of our lives,” he writes, “in order to be human.”

Giamatti’s definition of self-reliance couldn’t be more different from that of Emerson and more cynical American leaders today, however, who isolate themselves from the ideas of culture and the lessons of history. “The maturing of America will occur when we have absorbed, not rejected, our past,” Giamatti writes, “our past as various peoples from diverse cultures, not simply as entrepreneurs of the soul.”

Although Giamatti clearly is dismayed by growing anti-intellectualism in America, he rises above his concern with one of the most eloquent defenses of the mind’s nobility to come our way in a long time (“We must continue to choose to continue,” he tells intellectuals), and with humor.

While president of Yale, he visited a congressman to voice his concern about the nation’s commitment to higher education. “We intend to uncap retirement,” the congressman said in Giamatti’s somewhat-fictionalized account, “cap technology transfer, cut the NEA and NSF; get rid of the Library of Congress and slash the Health Manpower Act. We want to get this country moving again.” The Congressman then ushers Giamatti out the door: “Let me tell you it is an honor having you here. Education is a wonderful thing. Made the country what it is today.”

ARE MOTHERS REALLY NECESSARY?

by Bob Mullan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: $16.95) The author answers in the affirmative, not surprisingly, but his title remains an ingenious one, for it suggests that we have yet to consider the hard questions raised by women’s growing equality in the workplace and at home: How can women maintain an equal footing in their careers while still taking time off from work to bear a child? How can we mitigate the social stigmas and financial woes of staying at home to rear a child? Can fathers be mothers, too?

To this last question, Bob Mullan answers “no”--at least, he would qualify, within the confines of our present culture. His conviction is based on the 1950s and ‘60s work of British child psychiatrist John Bowlby, who, Mullan writes, “asserted that ‘mother love’ . . . was as important to the mental health of children as vitamins are to their physical health.” While feminists in the 1960s attacked Bowlby’s work as a subtle attempt to keep mothers at home and make working mothers feel guilty, Mullan argues here that most of Bowlby’s ideas have since been affirmed in feminist texts.

Summarizing Bowlby, Mullan, an accomplished author who holds a Ph.D. in political science from the London School of Economics, convincingly argues that social problems often attributed to poverty and education, such as unemployment, loneliness and divorce, more often stem from problematic mother-child relations, for it is here that “we begin to feel confident with other people, liked and wanted, or we begin to feel rejected, unwanted and out of place.”

Mullan’s arguments become more questionable, however, when he asserts that men cannot at present “provide constant and consistent attention in the child’s developing years.” It might well be true, as Mullan asserts, that the “new man,” sensitive to his obligation as a parent with responsibilities equal to the mother’s, is a “journalist’s fiction.”

But it is defeatist to say that “only in future generations . . . will men begin to acquire from their mothers some of the parental qualities necessary to form maternal relations with others.” In a matter of years, women have been able to learn masculine behavior in order to adjust to corporate culture; it only stands to reason that men could become more maternal if they so chose.

NOWHERE TO GO

The Tragic Odyssey of

the Homeless Mentally Ill

by E. Fuller Torrey MD (Harper & Row: $18.95) This book spotlights what is undoubtedly the greatest irony in America’s mental health care profession: The more skilled our mental health care experts, the more likely they are to be found treating the least sick patients--giving (non-medical) psychotherapy to wealthy suburbanites whom psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey calls “the worried well.”

The crisis for America’s 200,000 “seriously mentally ill” homeless (the figure excludes alcoholics and drug addicts) has deepened, Torrey writes, because many public mental health programs care for them as “outpatients” when hospitalization is the only effective treatment, or fail to care for them at all: Between 1955 and 1984, the number of patients in U.S. mental institutions declined by over 75% (85% in California).

Torrey’s solutions are sound: Housing for the mentally ill must be improved, research dollars must be increased and the “psychiatric profession must be expected to treat seriously mentally ill individuals.” This last point is problematic, however, for “expecting” psychiatrists to treat the seriously mentally ill will not be enough, and yet requiring them to do so undoubtedly will generate strong opposition from powerful lobbying groups such as the American Medical Assn.

“Nowhere to Go” is likely to generate catalytic discussion, nevertheless, about why we have gone, as Torrey writes, from the “Great Society” envisioned in the early 1960s, where Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs) were founded nationwide, to a “Grate Society” of the late 1980s, where CMHCs have no choice but to send the mentally ill back to the streets.

THE SKYWARD TREND OF THOUGHT

The Metaphysics of

the American Skyscraper

by Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen (MIT Press: $25) Thomas van Leeuwen, an architecture professor looking wryly at America from his home in the Netherlands, departs from the traditional view of skyscrapers as an eminently practical way of concentrating commerce and suggests that the skyscraper, invented by Americans, is also a reflection of America.

Van Leeuwen’s notion rings true, for it is understandable that so confident a structure should emerge from America, rather than Europe: While Europeans, living amid ancient buildings, realized that their lives were circumscribed by centuries of tradition, Americans grew from a pristine landscape; the experience of conquering the frontier and creating a new life instilled a certain boldness that continues to define the American character today. As van Leeuwen writes, “Americans had escaped Europe and its history willfully in order to create a new universe and to initiate a new time, disconnected from the immediate past.”

It can be argued that Van Leeuwen is suggesting a degree of premeditation that would have been unusual for American colonialists, much less for America’s early architects, who were pragmatic engineers, in contrast to their philosophical European counterparts. Americans more likely built, as van Leeuwen quotes John Ruskin as saying, “in mere exuberance of spirit and power--as they dance or sing--with a certain mingling of vanity--like a child builds a tower of cards.”

Like Mircea Eliade, however, the religion scholar who inspired some of the author’s theories, Van Leeuwen realizes that culture is shaped as much by subconscious thoughts as by conscious intent. Van Leeuwen shows, for example, how building booms served as “magic totems” to ward off evil turns of the economy in 1875, 1929 and 1982, and studies early 20th-Century disputes over whether skyscrapers could be taller than churches. He concludes that even the new “Cathedrals of Commerce” had spiritual foundations, such as Andrew Carnegie’s theories, which, Van Leeuwen writes, “overflowed with morality, mysticism and piety.”